Definitely Appearance 0. 🎲

Yesterday, I went to go see Nosferatu with liszante at the Davis Theatre with live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. The theater even had remnant organ pipes still up on the walls from when there was an organ installed in it, though the actual performance was done using samples.

It's been a very long time since I'd seen a silent movie--not since Metropolis back when I was a university student--and I had forgotten how exaggerated the style of acting was. I couldn't help but think of miming, especially with Hutter and Knock's performances. The film is much less horror for modern audiences than it would have been a century ago due to that. Often, when Count Orlok was looming and Hutter would reel back with an expression of horror, frantically looking around the room, the audience laughed. Admittedly, I did too. To modern sensibilities it was ridiculous, but it certainly did an effective job of conveying their emotions, especially accompanied with Warren's music.

People also laughed at the scene of Count Orlok just...casually strolling through the streets with a coffin full of grave earth under one arm. I really want to know how that played to 1920s audiences.

The movie was pretty effective at selling the mood of creeping doom, especially later, with the scenes of the town officials marking the doors of the "plague"-stricken houses and the procession of coffins being carried through the streets. liszante also told me there was a long scene of the ship sailing into Wisborg cut with scenes of Hutter riding back to town but, uh, I was asleep for that. Live music, no matter the context, no matter the genre, makes me sleepy. Even when I went to a Within Temptation concert back in March, I ended up getting sleepy by the end. But I rallied for the final act.

I hadn't realized that Nosferatu was literally Dracula with the serial numbers filed off either. But once Knock the property agent showed up, I figured it out.

And...antisemitism. I don't think it's Nazi propaganda or anything, but I couldn't help but notice that it's the property agent specifically who falls under Count Orlok's sway and, indeed, the way that an Eastern European man who looks ugly and distinctive is literally sucking the blood of good German women. That rendered some of the scenes later on the movie more uncomfortable for me than they might have been for most of the audience, because regardless of Murnau's intentions, the imagery was definitely there.

He was a brilliant director, though. I've seen plenty of stills of Count Orlok's shadow climbing the staircase and the count vanishing when hit by the rays of the sun, but in the theater, accompanied by the organ, they were still effective.

In summary, I'm saddened that Der Totenvogel isn't the name of a metal band. And I can see why Nosferatu survived down through the ages and is regarded as a cinematic classic.

I have almost no experience with musou (無双, "peerless, unrivaled," referring to the skill of the warriors) games, other than playing Dynasty Warriors 3 with my high school friends. I had a soft spot for Pang Tong and played him in multiplayer a couple times, and the phrase "Humble the rebels!" is a meme among us to this day. But that's about as far as it went. Some of them continued further in the Warriors series, but I never did.

That means that I came into Hyrule Warriors without any preconceptions. I knew that I would be fighting enemy lieutenants and generals, that I'd be running around accomplishing objectives, and that I'd be killing thousands of enemies. And all of that definitely happened! I saw a stream of the game before I bought it and the streamer was complaining that it didn't feel like a Legend of Zelda game, and I can see that. There's no puzzles to solve. There's no dungeons to delve into. But Hyrule Warriors is a Koei game, and thus a musou game first, and it actually had more Zelda in it than I was lead to expect.

I mean, I was constantly throwing bombs at everything. That's quintessential Legend of Zelda.

I had originally planned to play this game in Japanese, but after I bought it on the eShop, I learned that, bizarrely, Koei games often have Western and Eastern versions and I had bought the Western version with only European language support. It's not a mainline Zelda game, so it doesn't really bother me, but it was a bit surprising. Had I played it in Japanese, the title would have been ゼルダ無双 ハイラルオールスターズ DX, "Zelda Unrivaled Hyrule All Stars DX."


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My achievements tell me I've beaten this game before, when it was the SD version, but I didn't have any memory of it so I decided to play it again.

Eufloria was the first Art Game I ever bought, back when I lived in Japan, Wrath of the Lich King was getting long in the tooth, and I was looking for something else to occupy my time other than playing World of Warcraft exclusively as my computer entertainment. Eufloria was calm, and relaxing, with a space ambient soundtrack, gameplay that gave you plenty of time to react to what was going on, simple principles, and plenty to do. My achievements tell me that I started playing some time in 2010 but I didn't beat it until 2013, which isn't the longest I've ever gone between starting and finishing a game, but it's in the top 10, I think. Not too long after I finished it, they released an HD version and I always thought that I'd get around to play it.

Well...six years later, I have.


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Back in 2015, I learned about the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night from people who had watched it and noticed its similarities to my favorite platformer of all time, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In the video, Igarashi Kōji promises to make a game in the style of the old Castlevania games now that Konami isn't interested in doing anything with the IP other than making uncomfortably sexual pachinko games, and basically that's it. There's almost nothing about the actual game in there other than that it would be in the style of Castlevania, but that video! Igarashi walks around an old castle lit by torchlight, he sits at the head of a table and takes a swig from a wineglass before hurling it to shatter on the ground, and he walks outside and transforms into a cloud of bats. I fully admit that I was sold entirely on the game based on the pitch video without even really knowing what the game would be like.

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't follow the development very closely, then. Through reading USGamer I heard about bringing in Inti Creates, who made the excellent Blaster Master Zero, to help work on the game. I saw the video of all the complaints about the art style where Igarashi once again threw down a wine glass and shouted "I will prove them wrong!" This had all the ingredients of a disaster in the making.

Then Curse of the Moon came out and it was great. And now Ritual of the Night came out and it's fantastic. We wanted Symphony of the Night reborn, and by G-d, that's what we got.


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名探偵ピカチュウ? More like 迷探偵ピカチュウ!

I saw it yesterday with lisekatevans and I thought it was just okay.

( More within, also spoilers )

The Sonic trailer played before the movie, which caught me by surprise. It's delayed and it was widely panned, so I'm surprised they haven't pulled it. There was no overt mockery in the theatre, because lisekatevans and I were two of five people there, but she was taken aback by how awful it looked. She commented on the usage of "Gangster's Paradise" as the trailer song and I said it was the most Sonic-esque thing about it. I feel like at this point, that trailer is only further hurting marketing.

I was neutral on Detective Pikachu, but it's much better than...that

This is it. The end of the road. The final step on the journey.

I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?

Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.

But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.

The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."


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I first started playing Dragon Age: Origins a decade ago, shortly after it first came out. Though I was living in Japan at the time and Steam wouldn't let me buy anything due to the conflict between my billing address and my IP, I asked a friend to gift me a copy because I was so excited about the game. Another CRPG by Bioware, which had made Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights? The promise that your choices, especially your origin story, would deeply affect how the game played out for you? I had been following news of the game for months and I was so excited to play it that I mostly abandoned playing World of Warcraft and dove into Dragon Age, playing twenty hours in a couple weeks even though I was working fifty hour weeks with a two hour commute at the time.

Then, my hard drive crashed and Steam didn't back up my save.

The famed Japanese customer service returned my laptop good as new, including sending a courier to my house to pack it up in a box to my satisfaction and deliver it back to me when it was fixed, and I had fortunately backed up all my music and documents on schoolpsychnerd's new laptop a month or so before the crash, but twenty hours of Dragon Age: Origins was gone. I was discouraged enough that I just went back to World of Warcraft, where my character was preserved on external servers, and didn't touch Dragon Age for a decade. It took the recent Square Roots Podcast series on Dragon Age: Origins to convince me to take a break from Breath of the Wild and pull me back into the game.

It was fun, but I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I had played it back when it came out.


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Ereyesterday meowtima invited me to go see Alita: Battle Angel with him and someone else he knows with the same name as me. I went after work, I established dominance over the other me by being one month older than him and unseating his usual place as the oldest in any group, and then we went in to the movie. These are my thoughts.

( The face of an angel and a body built for battle )

You would think that Darkest Dungeon would be the perfect game for me. And it is--this isn't a bad review, so don't think I'm tipping my hand early--but while I leaped on the kickstarter the instant I learned about it, I withdrew my pledge when they added in a backer-exclusive class. I'm fine with kickstarter-exclusive cosmetics or silly, non-gameplay-affecting content, but the idea of a mechanical benefit to kickstarter supports sat badly enough with me that I was willing to forgo playing the game entirely. Then I played other games, and it faded from my consciousness.

Until 2016, when ping816 suddenly bought it as a present for me. And then I learned that the kickstarter had suffered from unclear communication and the backer class was the Musketeer, a cosmetic skin over the top of the Arbalest with all the same mechanics, so I needn't have been so suspicious in the first place. Well, live and learn.

And then I was playing Baldur's Gate II and the Legend of Zelda games, but last November, now that I was finally all the way up to Breath of the Wild, I loaded it up. The screen went black, and then I was greeted with the opening cinematic:

Ruin has come to our family.

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor. I lived all my years in that ancient rumor shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of... conventional extravagance...

Hell. Yes.


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Also, if you want to hear what I sound like / a bit of RP, I did a Facebook thread where I chronicled my progress through this game, and I recorded the last update from the Heir after I beat the game. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.

I spent a big chunk of yesterday at the Anime Chicago Winter Sampler where we watched the first episode of a few anime coming out this season, so I'm going to write about them again!

( アニメ )